We establish exponential decay of correlations of all orders for locally $G$-accessible isometric extensions of transitive Anosov flows, under the assumption that the strong stable and strong unstable foliations of the base Anosov flow are jointly $C^1$. This is accomplished by translating accessibility properties of the extension into local non-integrability estimates measured by Dolgopyat's infinitesimal transitivity group, from which we obtain contraction properties for a class of 'twisted' symbolic transfer operators.
We prove that for the frame flow on a negatively curved, closed manifold of odd dimension other than 7, and a Holder continuous potential that is constant on fibers, there is a unique equilibrium measure. We prove a similar result for automorphisms of the Heisenberg manifold fibering over the torus. Our methods also give an alternate proof of Brin and Gromov's result on the ergodicity of these frame flows.
We consider a billiard in the sphere S^2 with circular obstacles, and give a sufficient condition for its flow to be uniformly hyperbolic. We show that the billiard flow in this case is approximated by an Anosov geodesic flow on a surface in the ambiant space S^3. As an application, we show that every orientable surface of genus at least 11 admits an isometric embedding into S^3 (equipped with the standard metric) such that its geodesic flow is Anosov. Finally, we explain why this construction cannot provide examples of isometric embeddings of surfaces in the Euclidean R^3 with Anosov geodesic…
We study circle extensions of analytic Anosov maps on the two torus: these are examples of partially hyperbolic maps for which the qualitative ergodic theory is well understood. In this paper we investigate rates of mixing (for the SRB measure) and prove explicit lower bounds involving the topological pressure of two times the unstable Jacobian. In particular we study the case when the extension function ("roof function") is given by a random trigonometric polynomial.
We consider extensions of Anosov diffeomorphisms of an infranilmanifold by the real vector space R^ω. Our main result, based on the analogous theorem in finite dimensions proven by Nitica and Pollicott, is that any Holder cocycle satisfying an obvious obstruction induces a topologically transitive extension (topologically weak mixing, in fact). We show how to construct cocycles satisfying these conditions for any Anosov diffeomorphism, and then observe that unlike the finite dimensional case, where cocycles satisfying the obstruction are C^0-stably transitive, there can be no infinite-dimensio…
The aim of this paper is to study growth properties of group extensions of hyperbolic dynamical systems, where we do not assume that the extension satisfies the symmetry conditions seen, for example, in the work of Stadlbauer on symmetric group extensions and of the authors on geodesic flows. Our main application is to growth rates of periodic orbits for covers of an Anosov flow: we reduce the problem of counting periodic orbits in an amenable cover $X$ to counting in a maximal abelian subcover $X^{\mathrm{ab}}$. In this way, we obtain an equivalence for the Gurevič entropy: $h(X)=h(X^{\mathrm…
We address the classical problem of equivalence between Kolmogorov and Bernoulli property of smooth dynamical systems. In a natural class of volume preserving partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms homotopic to Anosov ("derived from Anosov") on 3-torus, we prove that Kolmogorov and Bernoulli properties are equivalent. In our approach, we propose to study the conditional measures of volume along central foliation to recover fine ergodic properties for partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms. As an important consequence we obtain that there exists an almost everywhere conjugacy between any volume pre…
We characterize and describe the extensions of expansive and Anosov homeomorphisms on compact spaces. As an application we obtain a stability result for extensions of Anosov systems, and show a construction that embeds any expansive system inside an expansive system having the shadowing property for the pseudo orbits of the original space.
We describe a circle of ideas relating the dynamics of 2-dimensional homeomorphisms to that of 1-dimensional endomorphisms. This is used to introduce a new class of maps generalizing that of Thurston's pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms.
Let $F',F$ be any two closed orientable surfaces of genus $g'>g\ge 1$, and $f:F\to F$ be any pseudo-Anosov map. Then we can "extend" $f$ to be a pseudo-Anosov map $f':F'\to F'$ so that there is a fiber preserving degree one map $M(F',f')\to M(F,f)$ between the hyperbolic surface bundles. Moreover the extension $f'$ can be chosen so that the surface bundles $M(F',f')$ and $M(F,f)$ have the same first Betti numbers.
For Anosov flows obtained by suspensions of Anosov diffeomorphisms on surfaces, we show the following type of rigidity result: if a topological conjugacy between them is differentiable at a point, then the conjugacy has a smooth extension to the suspended 3-manifold. These result generalize the similar ones of Sullivan and Ferreira-Pinto for 1-dimensional expanding dynamics and also a result of Ferreira-Pinto for 2-dimensional hyperbolic dynamics.
For any $C^r$ contact Anosov flow with $r\ge 3$, we construct a scale of Hilbert spaces, which are embedded in the space of distributions on the phase space and contain all $C^r$ functions, such that the transfer operators for the flow extend to them boundedly and that the extensions are quasi-compact. Further we give explicit bounds on the essential spectral radii of the extensions in terms of the differentiability r and the hyperbolicity exponents of the flow.
We establish an extension of the Hopf-Tsuji-Sullivan dichotomy to any Zariski dense discrete subgroup of a semisimple real algebraic group $G$. We then apply this dichotomy to Anosov subgroups of $G$, which surprisingly presents a different phenomenon depending on the rank of the ambient group $G$.
We consider smooth partially hyperbolic volume preserving Z^k actions on smooth manifolds, with uniformly compact center foliation. We show that under certain irreducibility condition on the action, bunching and uniform quasiconformality conditions, the action is a smooth fiber bundle extension of an Anosov action, or the center foliation is pathological. We obtain several corollaries of this result. For example, we prove a global dichotomy result that any smooth conservative circle extension over a maximal Cartan action is either essentially a product of an action by rotations and a linear An…
Given a general pseudo-Anosov flow in a three manifold, the orbit space of the lifted flow to the universal cover is homeomorphic to an open disk. We compactify this orbit space with an ideal circle boundary. If there are no perfect fits between stable and unstable leaves and the flow is not topologically conjugate to a suspension Anosov flow, we then show: The ideal circle of the orbit space has a natural quotient space which is a sphere and is a dynamical systems ideal boundary for a compactification of the universal cover of the manifold. The main result is that the fundamental group acts o…
We establish new characterizations for (pseudo)isometric extensions of topological dynamical systems. For such extensions, we also extend results about relatively invariant measures and Fourier analysis that were previously only known in the minimal case to a significantly larger class, including all transitive systems. To bypass the reliance on minimality of the classical approaches to isometric extensions via the Ellis semigroup, we show that extensions of topological dynamical systems can be described as groupoid actions and then adapt the concept of enveloping semigroups to construct a uni…
Let F be a foliation in a closed 3-manifold with negatively curved fundamental group and suppose that F is almost transverse to a quasigeodesic pseudo-Anosov flow. We show that the leaves of the foliation in the universal cover extend continuously to the sphere at infinity, hence the limit sets are continuous images of the circle. One important corollary is that if F is a Reebless finite depth foliation in a hyperbolic manifold, then it has the continuous extension property. Such finite depth foliations exist whenever the second Betti number is non zero. The result also applies to other classe…
We consider a $\mathbb R/\mathbb Z$ extension of an Anosov diffemorphism of a compact Riemannian manifold by a random function $τ$ and show that the flat traces of the transfer operator, reduced with respect to frequency in the fibers, converge in law towards Gaussians, up to an Ehrenfest time that decreases with the regularity of $τ$.
We consider a family of isometric extensions of the full shift on p symbols (for p a prime) parametrized by a probability space. Using Heath-Brown's work on the Artin conjecture, it is shown that for all but two primes p the set of limit points of the growth rate of periodic points is infinite almost surely. This shows in particular that the dynamical zeta function is not algebraic almost surely.
